Internet Business Part 1 – Selecting Your Business

This is the first part of a weekly series on how to start and run your own Internet Business. It really isn’t as difficult as you might expect to run your own Internet business. As we get into this series, you will see that there are so many different kinds of businesses that you can run via the Internet that there is a business for every personality type.

We will start from the very beginning and cover everything from products to services and several methods of being paid via the Internet.

Let’s start with selecting the product or service you want to offer. Remember that you won’t be stuck with whatever you select. You can always add more products and services later. You can also stop offering any product or service at any time. It is your business. You are in complete control.

Some people will suggest that you choose something that you enjoy. While I think that is great advice in general and will help keep you motivated, it is really more important to choose something that helps other people. The ease of attaining success in an Internet business is directly related to how many people you can help and how much you help them.

So instead of thinking about what you enjoy doing, it is better to focus on a problem that needs to be solved. Entrepreneurs get into the habit of noticing problems in their everyday life. When they feel like complaining or they hear someone else complaining about something, their ears perk up. Instead of commiserating like most people, they jump into solution mode.

They ask themselves what could be done differently that would have eliminated that problem. How much would people pay to have that thing done differently? How many people want the problem solved? How much money do they have in disposable income and how much of that would they be willing to spend to solve the problem?

To a successful entrepreneur, a problem is an opportunity for a new product or service. A truly successful entrepreneur has figured out how to solve a problem that plagues a lot of other people, but has solved it in a way they the entrepreneur enjoys.

This may come automatically. For instance, maybe you love to write. A lot of people hate writing, but need to write for various reasons. Maybe they need advertisements written. Or maybe they need content for their blog or web-site. It’s a perfect fit. You should probably offer a writing service.

Or maybe you know how to design fancy web-sites and you love to do that. A lot of people don’t have those skills and hate playing with HTML code even if they did have those skills. That’s a perfect fit.

Most people don’t have such a perfect fit though. They can’t figure out how to do what they really enjoy while solving the problems of other people at the same time. That is key to a successful Internet business, so I’m going to tell you a cool trick to find your niche.

It is a very simple process. You know what you enjoy. So you set up a free blog on blogger.com or wordpress.org with that topic in the name of the blog. So if you really like skydiving, you try to get skydiving.blogger.com or skydiver.wordpress.org or something similar. Then you post a single blog entry with the following question:

What stops you from enjoying skydiving more?

Then invite them to leave a comment with their answer. You can try other wordings for the question. The point is that you enjoy the topic (skydiving in this case). You want to hear about the problems. Ask a question that invites your audience to complain about something.

Now run a campaign on Yahoo advertising to drive some people to your new blog. Your ad should have the same question in the text so when you pay for a click, you have someone who is likely to answer the question.

After you have several answers, you will see a pattern. Go into entrepreneur mode and decide on a great way to solve that problem. Maybe you already have a solution because you are a skydiver and you had that problem yourself before you found an answer.

You can now write an ebook with the solution. Or you can record an audio or a video. Or you can offer a service if that solves the problem better. That is what successful happy entrepreneurs do. They solve problems on a topic that they enjoy.

We will continue this series next week with another important tip about running your own Internet business.